What No One Took the Time to Translate for Her

THEY DID NOT TRANSLATE THE TRUTH. THEY TRANSLATED HER SENTENCE. When Mariela Gálvez, a Salvadoran migrant woman who did not speak English, went into unexpected labor in a portable toilet and lost her baby, the US judicial system charged her with homicide in less than twenty-four hours. Without adequate interpreters, without real defense, and without understanding the charges, Mariela becomes the perfect scapegoat for a crime she never committed.
What follows is a brutal fifteen-year journey in a prison where dignity is a luxury, food is a business, communication is a debt, and survival is a new language. Amid abuse, "pseudo-families, " power relations, extortion, abandonment, and a system designed to profit from every incarcerated body, Mariela loses everything... except her ability to resist. But freedom is not the end: it is another labyrinth.
Deported to the country she left behind, Mariela must learn to live in a world that has moved on without her, where technology overwhelms her, the people judge her, and her own name is tainted by a story that was never hers. Based on structures and abuses documented in real prisons in the United States, this novel is an urgent denunciation, a story that hurts, that makes you uncomfortable, and that exposes what happens behind the most hermetic walls of the modern prison system.
A book you will not be able to forget.